Twenty years ago the Internet was primarily used to consume information and speed up communication. The Internet has changed dramatically and now enables sensitive and personalized interactions with traditional business such as financial institutions, retailers, healthcare providers, and government in addition to a new breed of sharing economy service providers that offer services like ridesharing, temporary work, accommodations and dating. The sharing economy, which enables peer to peer based sharing or access to goods and services, is a particularly sensitive category where an interaction can touch our physical lives (e.g., ridesharing services drive people around, online classifieds connect people to local goods and services, accommodation services let people rent individual rooms within homes or entire houses, dating sites help people find long and short term relationships, etc.). Today, however, little is known or verified about the parties involved in these interactions. The lack of a simple way to establish trust in a peer-to-peer fashion will limit the potential of this new breed of Internet services.
Conventionally, interactions to date have been simplified with little risk, e.g., need a ride, sell a used phone, connect virtually to someone, etc. However, even these simplified interactions have been problematic—reported assaults on ride-sharing services, scams on e-commerce sites, terrorists and other mischievous individuals using social networks, etc. The sensitivity of these interactions is only increasing—consider ridesharing to pick up a child from school, selling an item where the buyer will enter your home, leveraging on-demand temporary staff, or searching for a brief personal encounter. Each of these applications offers a far richer experience but comes with far greater risk to personal safety and well-being. The scale, speed, complexity, and global nature of the Internet and these applications brings an entirely new level of risk, and, unfortunately, new avenues for bad actors to exploit it.
Establishing trust online poses several challenges that do not affect our traditional, offline methods of determining trust. Online, people do not truly know who they are dealing with; and, therefore, cannot determine if they are deserving of trust. This fundamentally limits our willingness to engage in interactions on the Internet. Without a reliable basis for establishing trust, people either trust or distrust for arbitrary reasons, e.g. new service is popular, generational differences lead to risk avoidance, or a user has many social media followers. Online, users often are required to submit personal information as they register for new services. However, they are increasingly concerned about providing such information due to the frequency of data breaches and hacks. These are some of the types of challenges associated with establishing trust online. Without a reliable basis for establishing trust online, there is a ceiling on the type of interactions we are willing to use the Internet to facilitate.
Conventionally, trust is addressed differently by different providers.                Social networks have policies on inappropriate content and work tirelessly to expel users while avoiding thorny freedom of speech issues;        Sharing economy providers and commerce sites use peer reviews to ensure that bad actors have limited opportunity. Under pressure, some have added more extensive background checks. But they constantly balance adoption with safety and security;        Sharing economy providers who specialize in offering temporary work often do some level of validation of the workers who deliver the services. Lack of transparency and standards or regulation prevent consistency;        Social activity sites leave it to users to protect themselves and rarely (if ever) offer peer reviews;        Financial institutions often rely on knowledge-based questions to establish identity which is limited in its ability to establish true identity;        Users often simply take a leap of faith putting their personal safety at risk utilizing the services offered.        
Online trust must evolve. A more reliable and transparent trust model is needed to support the scale, speed, complexity, and global nature of the current and future interactions facilitated by the Internet.
As part of building a trust model online, it is imperative to verify, bind, and store aspects of an individual's identity online, e.g., in a personal data store. As the information stored is extremely valuable and sensitive to the individual as well as its veracity important to relying parties, techniques are required to vet the information and securely store it.